Television Commercial for Communism

2011

Imagine for a brief moment, that the world’s last five remaining communist countries decided to unite forces and hire the world’s top advertising agencies to re-brand and create a resurgence in the ideologies of Communism? Television Commercial for Communism [TVCC] embarks to re-position our relationship to current global economics and socio-politics by getting the world’s leading advertising companies to pitch their most radical ideas to re-brand Communism. How will capitalism’s most influential by-product, the advertising machine, process its former political opponent in a post Cold War context, still saturated with Cold War idiosyncrasies?

PROJECT OVERVIEW

This video installation work has 2 components, a synchronized 5 channel video installation projection and a single channel video presented on an LED monitor. It is a collaboration with TBWA \ Viet Nam. TBWA [tbwa.com] is the advertising team behind Apple’s “Think Different” campaign as well as the award-winning advertising campaigns for Nissan and Adidas.

The first component is a synchronized 5 channel video installation that documents the creative team at TBWA \ Viet Nam in their process of brainstorming, discussing and presenting their pitch as they develop a media campaign to promote and gain positive “brand identity” for Communism.

As the brainstorming sessions are the meat of the advertising process, every round-table discussion is documented with 5 cameras shooting simultaneously into the ‘round-table’ setup. These synchronized video channels are then projected outwards in a pentagonal configuration inside the exhibition space; rendering a complex viewing experience, turning a round-table advertising brainstorming session shot from the outside-in into an inside-out panoramic view of how advertising processes it’s Cold War antithesis.

The agency’s animatic, a video mock-up of the actual commercial that utilizes storyboard images, music, and voice over to help clients visualize the final commercial, is displayed on a large LED monitor as the second component of the installation.

The project’s ultimate ambition is to work with more of the world’s top advertising agencies and realize a series of compelling television commercials and advertising campaigns. The campaign will launch featuring cinema, TV, print, out-of-home installations, digital elements and more. All of the media will be made available as free downloads via an official website and made available on social media sites such as facebook, youtube and vimeo.

THE FINAL CONCEPT & ANIMATIC

In this first iteration of the TVCC project, the creative team at TBWA\VIETNAM decides on a final concept that combines the look-and-feel of handmade paper animation with a voice over of a pledge for the new communism. The animation depicts a young girl character who traverses a world that’s portrayed using layers of paper, and as she interacts with the various sorts of people in this environment, they exchange smiles with her. The only things in color are the symbolic smiles exchanged. The smiles, the new “currency” of Communism are then brought together to form the new flag of Communism.